The Mind of Shiva
by Erinya
Summary: The end and the beginning cannot be teased apart. Existential Time Lord angst. Oneshot.


**Warnings**: Existential Time Lord angst. Non-aggressive spoilers for new Who up to and including _Girl in the Fireplace_. Vague intimations of _Doomsday_, but not really. Mentions of former companions I really don't know much about.  
**Pairings**: Doctor/Rose; Doctor/Reinette; Doctor/TARDIS; Doctor/Earth, in a weird but not kinky way.  
**Disclaimer**: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC.

* * *

**The Mind of Shiva**

The Doctor's mind is like the TARDIS, full of rooms he tries not to walk into. Or perhaps the TARDIS is like his mind. Sometimes he can open a door without thinking, a door that usually leads somewhere else, and suddenly he'll be in Ace's old room, or Jamie's, or Sarah Jane's. The TARDIS forgets nothing. She gets all the details right, or perhaps she just preserves them. A brush lying on the sideboard, a strand of hair tangled in the bristles. A bed half-made. A battered paperback splayed spine up to mark the page, as if the long-gone owner has just left for a moment and will return any time now to finish the chapter.

He always closes the door in lieu of the book. The story will go unfinished forever. He knows the ending, anyway.

Outside of time, the TARDIS doesn't understand "forever." Accustomed to resurrection, she doesn't understand "gone."

She doesn't understand linear chronology, either. Sometimes he walks into rooms and doesn't know who they belong to. Not yet.

Is that all he is? A maze of empty spaces?

* * *

The Doctor is in love with Earth. 

He thinks he must be in love with her, or in something like love, because he returns to her again and again, and he never gets tired of her. He weaves himself into her history, makes himself part of her. Just like any other alien, and they all seem to come here wanting something, he craves what she can give him.

She needs him. She's always on the edge of disaster, and that's what he loves about her. He saves her again and again. She's the planet he can save.

Until he can't, of course. But even though the Sun swallows her down at last, Earth is still there, in her small pocket of space and time; she endures as Gallifrey has not, changes in the ways Gallifrey will never change again. She will always be where he's left her, waiting for his return. Her children will spread themselves out among the stars.

No one can return to Gallifrey. She does not exist in time or space, at least in any place that he can travel towards, in any time he can pass through. There is no Gallifrey. There was no Gallifrey, ever, not anymore, except inside him. He is her only child now, her prodigal. He's all that's left of her.

He does not love Earth because she reminds him of Gallifrey. Earth, with her teeming, variegated creatures that race headlong and wild and always towards disaster, is nothing like his mother planet, where little ever changed at all. Dancing through time made his people slow to act, complacent in full knowledge of their fates.

He was the only one who ever tried to fight it, to alter the steps of the dance, to invent new choreography. In more than one way, it's the reason he's the last of them.

* * *

Sometimes, the TARDIS opens a door and he stands on the threshold of a perfect replica of a Revolution-era French bedchamber, complete with fireplace, only lacking the girl he always hopes, for an instant, to see. The clock always reads the same time. Perhaps it's broken, still. 

The TARDIS does it for him, he knows, reading between the syncopated lines of his hearts to that suspended beat of yearning; but he says, "Stop that, you," and shuts the door hard, leans his weight against it: an infinity behind him, a hole in the universe in the shape of memory, in the shape of Reinette's absence.

Reinette, who saw that depth, and named it. Reinette, whose early life he goes back to over and over like the pages of a favorite book, writing himself in her margins, footnotes and grace notes. He savors her as slowly as he can, because one day there will be no days left of her.

He never goes back to the days after they said goodbye for the first time, for the last time. He cannot bear to watch her fade. He wants there to be one thing of which he does not have to see the end.

Or perhaps he simply cannot bear to see her once she has come to understand him. It will, he fears, bring him to want too much.

* * *

Rose has seen into his abyss too, followed the TARDIS light into it and pulled him out, but she does not remember. Even so, sometimes she looks at him with a certain kind of light in her eyes, and he wonders if perhaps she understands that part of him all too well, and pretends not to because she remembers just enough to know he needs her not to see him as a god, lonely or otherwise, but as a man whose hand she can take to lead him home, even though that home cannot be his. He needs her misunderstanding, to be treated like a person, even though he's not one, not really. 

Rose is entirely of Earth. She changes in the ways he stays the same, stays the same in all the ways he changes. She's so brilliant with life, so temporary, that sometimes it hurts to look at her. She feels everything when he feels nothing, she is warm where he is cold. And she needs him. He only takes the ones who need him, who will need him even after he's showed them the end of worlds, and the stars, and the Dalek, and a hundred tints of alien sky.

Her need sustains him. In his own way, he's as much a monster as the rest of them that come to Earth, he knows. As hungry as they are. A parasite. What is he without something to save?

He holds tight to her hand because he knows that one day he'll let go. One day she'll be another room he never walks into. But she'll still be there, in her time, blooming. His vulgar innocent, his joyous primate, blowsy Rose.

He needs her to be there, even if he won't be.

* * *

Sometimes he dreams that he is spread thin between the stars, across countless more years than his own nine hundred, stretched out across time and space like a net, like a web, and nothing like a man at all. He is so many places, not always at once. He is so many times, sometimes in the same place over and over. He is so many Doctors, wears so many faces, and none of them are really his own.

* * *

Causality, like time, does not flow in just the one direction. The Doctor knows this, knows that to try to make a thing not end is to make it never begin. Rose knows, too, or she should: she's ripped a hole in time herself, once, clinging desperately to that which had to end. But humans can afford to love that much, to try to hold onto the things they love forever, because their wanting cannot be fulfilled. 

He cannot afford to want forever. And so he tries not to love her enough not to leave her, tries not to love her enough not to let her die. If she is to live, she has to die; she must go on without him, to go on at all.

The end and the beginning cannot be teased apart. The first thing he ever showed her was the death of her world. Someday, he will close a door between them and never open it again.

But today, this doomed, beloved world can be saved.

He takes her hand, weaving his fingers through hers, anchoring himself to the here and now, and pretends he doesn't know how it all ends.

"Run," he tells her, when she seems inclined to stand still, as if they have all the time in the world.

Even if they did, he thinks, it wouldn't be enough.


End file.
